Posted
by
Hemos
on Monday March 12, 2007 @07:36AM
from the questioning-the-wisdom dept.

Krishna Dagli writes "Two Ph.D. students at the University of California at Berkeley say that Daylight Saving Shift will not do any good or create any energy savings. We are already spending money for software upgrades in the name of saving energy and after reading following article I wonder has congress really studied the impact of DST shift? " I also read some back story on the concept; OTOH, I found TiVo's suggestions that I manually change everything on my Series 1 device to be somewhat...insulting.

My understanding is that this would only be true if it were year round. Accidents increase [nejm.org] on both [abc.net.au] the days that we spring forward [selfhelpmagazine.com] (less sleep) and the days that we fall back (interruption in our "circadian rhythms").

Of course, it turns out that it might not even save lives if year round [standardtime.com] (search for "school bus accidents").

Unofficial estimates claim that costs due to the DST change well exceed a billion dollars TODAY which is more than the theoretical energy savings added up over 10 years. The cost is real and immediately incurred. The savings is nebulous and not guaranteed. Even 5 year old kid math can figure this one out. Imagine if we spent that billion dollars on alternative energy research, or energy conservation efforts - we would end up saving a LOT more money and energy than any fucking stupid DST change could have. The DST change cost my company alone well over $100K in direct costs and lost productivity. Considering what our company went through, I hate to think of what fortune 1000 companies spent - I would assume that it would be in the millions for a good number of them.

Unofficial estimates claim that costs due to the DST change well exceed a billion dollars TODAY which is more than the theoretical energy savings added up over 10 years.

Where I work, we have a reasonably fresh environment. Better than any other significantly sized business that I am familiar with, mostly due to several rounds of cleanups. Everyone aware of the costs below was LAUGHING about how we are so much better off than a few bigger businesses in the industry who's stories we heard. Let's consider th

That's sort of an interesting way of looking at things. This change cost my company exactly $0, but it did cost me, personally, about 6 hours. The projects I'm working on are not going to be six hours late because of this. I simply worked longer.

The "lost productivity" line is nebulous at best - his activity was redirected from other projects, for sure, but the deadlines on those projects remained the same. If those projects were important and had tight deadlines, Bill would have not been moved to DST work, and the people impacted would have been warned to update their clocks manually...

I think you underestimate just how large / bad the problem was/is. In larger companies it is a huge effort. You seem to think that deadlines for other projects were

In our case, it involved about 40 people and about 1200 hours were billed.Tens of thousands of machines patched.Hundreds of pieces of software considered.Real projects were pushed back 4-6 weeks for this non-work.

Agree about "a day's work for a day's pay" angle you have. In fact, it's how we work around here-- any given day you can be off one project and on another random one that is now higher priority.

On/. we obey the laws of thermodynamics. You are absolutely, 100% using more energy running your headlights in your car. ALL of the energy used by your car comes from the gasoline that you put into it (with the small exception of any charge already in the battery when it was installed). Therefore, you are using more gasoline with your headlights on than you would if they were off. It might be too small to easily measure, but the difference is there.

If you want some tangible proof of this, find a small hand cranked generator and hook it up to a blinking light bulb. You can actually feel the crank get harder to turn when the light is lit and become easier when it goes off. So the more electricity used by your car, the more gasoline you use or your battery goes dead.

The days of going to work in the dark and leaving in the dark weigh heavy on the soul/psyche. DST is a big boost, IMO.

But that has nothing to do with DST, that has to do with 1) what time you come and go to work and how long you stay there, and 2) the days are simply shorter in the winter because the Earth's axis. In extreme Northern and Southern climates (think North and South polar regions), its daylight and dark 24 hours a day depending on the season, and changing the clock will not change that.

I heard on NPR the other day, that the _real_ reason for DST is not to save energy, but rather to appease the retail sector. They have data that people are more willing to go out and spend money after work if its not dark. So people go motoring around in their fuel efficient SUVs, blow money, and thus energy is saved!

Personally, I don't understand why humans are so clock oriented vs sun oriented. It kills me that houses in the US are built in random directions (unless there is a nice view) instead of oriented around the Sun.

My girlfriend's after a house with a south-facing yard, so as to catch all the sun it can (she's a garden enthusiast). It's amazing how many estate agents don't actually know which direction a given house faces.

In the early 80's I worked at an HVAC company. We had a program to do sizing estimates. You put in lat/long, ORIENTATION, window area, overhangs, heat sources (stoves, computers), humidity sources (coffee pots), ocupancy (heat + humidity there too), insulation R values in walls, roof, basement, etc.It would take that information and tell you what size AC you needed to cool it. With these measurements & no college degree (yet) I would come up with the same answer the boss did with his 20 years of expe

Technically, I said that the agent was overpaid, and not that you paid the agent, but...You pay the agent if you buy through the agent. You write a big check, and some percentage or flat fee comes out of that money and goes to the agent. I don't care how they word it in the agreement (they can word it either way, depending on locality, whether they are a buyer's agent or seller's agent, or whatever) the fact of the matter is that money goes from you to the agent. The seller knows how much the agent is getti

I'm in 100% agreement. It might not do anything for energy consumption but it sure does make me a happier camper! I work from 9:30 to 6 and while for the last three weeks there has been some light when I'm driving home, it's going to be REALLY nice to have an entire trip with daylight. Not only do I feel better and happier during the light hours, I also feel safer because everyone else around me is driving in the daylight too.I take a camping trip at the end of March every year and it will be SO nice to

I see your point, and I like it when you are a happy camper, but daylight savings does NOT change how many hours of daylight we have at our disposal.

I repeat DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME DOES NOT GIVE US MORE DAYLIGHT. It does not change the planets tilt, rotation speed, or smell.

Sorry, but it just bugs me when everyone claims it gives us more daylight. DST should be abolished altogether. Any companies that want to change their business hours for the seasons should do so on their own. Factories in the M

I think we're all aware of that. It must be nice to work in a business that can adjust business hours on their own without any serious repercussions but a lot of us don't have that luxury. I have to be at work when my clients are at work. That's one of the advantages my clients have to using us over using someone offshore. All of our clients live in an 8-5 world so I too live in an 8-5 world. I'm rather fond of my 8-5 world including more daylight after I get off of work. That's extra usable daylight which is the real pro DST argument as far as I can tell. I don't really think anyone believes that setting clocks a certain way impacts the amount of time the sun spends in the sky daily but nice straw man (a term I really think is overused but is unfortunately most appropriate here).

What 8-5 world? When I was in primary school (which is a helluva long time ago come to think of it) businesses started to change to flexi time. Only a few government departments run on an 8-5 schedule. DST makes no difference to the majority of people - they go to work when they feel like it. My conclusion is that you must be living in Washington DC...

That's a pretty snarky comment.There are very very few businesses where start / finish times really matter, though there are more where they are enforced. Service oriented you say? Contractors (carpenters, electricians, plumbers, sanitation, maintenance) not only can choose their hours as they please (with the exception of emergency calls), but the frequently do. Consumer banking keeps retail hours, so you need to be there when the storefront opens, but they have no regard for their customer's schedules; af

I'm rather fond of my 8-5 world including more daylight after I get off of work.

Before we had these time pieces, people got up at sunrise. Over the course of the six months between solstices, the change would be a minute a day at most in the temperate zone. This gradual adjustment went away when we started using sundials, which based the time of day on noon instead of sunrise.

Then we got clocks, which came in handy for things like train schedules. The railroads had a problem. When an Atchison, Topeka,

I repeat DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME DOES NOT GIVE US MORE DAYLIGHT. It does not change the planets tilt, rotation speed, or smell.

Whenever I hear someone talk about how awesome it is to have extra hours of daylight, I ask them why wouldn't it be better to just "recalibrate" the time zones so that "daylight savings time" is the new standard time, then just stop all this switching nonsense.

But time zones are another total pain in the ass, even if there's no switching back and forth. I recently found out the China has a single time zone, whereas the country would encompass about eight zones if they used our style of time zones. And have you seen the time zone map of the US? It makes no sense at all. Alabama is completely on central time, but if you go due north, Michigan is in . . . eastern time? WTF?

I personally advocate the abolition of time zones altogether. Let's all use Greenwich Mean Time, no time changes, and deal with it. Businesses and schools can just change their hours of operation, rather than messing with time itself. Sure, it would be weird to have sunrise at 6 pm and sunset at 6 am, but would it be any more complicated than the current system?

The nice thing about time zones is that you have a frame of reference when travelling. If you are at UTC-6 or UTC+4 you know the sun will come up in the AM and people will be up and about by 8. You need to be checked out of your hotel by noonish and you can guess when meals are. If someone says "Let's have drinks at 6" you don't have to wonder AM or PM. Sure a bit of research or questions could help, but I would find it disorienting, especially if changing time zones all the time. I'd have "breakfast"

I really wish I had mod points right now. The tag system as it is bugs me when they let articles in with questions in their titles. The tags are to classify the articles, not respond to or give feedback for them. Yes, no, maybe, slownewsday, etc... They're all worthless imo.

So what if an early DST doesn't really have huge enery savings? Of course, this is a research paper by 2 students at the People's Republic of Berkeley, who no doubt must be the most completely objective sources on the planet. (sarcasm off) There are benefits such as being able to actually go outside and get some exercise after work or do yard work because it's not too dark, being able to drive home after work in daylight and so on. I love DST and I wish the government had moved it up years ago, but I'm g

...if you sell BBQs and golf games.I was listening to a radio Show and the DST was the topic.It turns out that the makers of BBQs and the Golf lobby told Congress that DST was worth hundreds of millions of dollars for them and to continue the DST practice.

Why don't they just pass a law stating that for purposes of the government, standard work hours are shifted +1/-1hr within a given time period, and encourage private industry to do the same? That way you get your ability to drive home in daylight, and I don't have anyone screwing with my clocks.

(For that matter, if it's that big of a difference, why doesn't private industry decide to change business hours independently? Personally, I don't see it as a big enough change to be worth bothering -- but then, I exercise in the mornings rather than afternoons, and have an employer who allows me to shift my hours at will).

I want my daylight savings time for one reason - so I'm not woken at an ungodly (Ungodly? unGodly?) hour when the sun rises at its earliest, and I know I would be - if the sun didn't, my husband, who is very reactive to sunlight, would be awake and that would do it.

You know, except for all the TV shows on cable shifting by an hour, I really didn't miss having to run around the house changing the clocks twice a year when I lived in Saskatchewan. But, now that I'm outside of Saskatchewan, I'm also bombarded by those idiot^H^H^H^H^Hpeople who say "You lose an hour of sleep tonight"...well...no I don't...and I also won't "be well rested tonight because I'll get an extra hour of sleep"...guess what: I don't use an alarm clock. I get up when I get up. I don't gain or l

I can tell you with absolute certainty that I definitely woke up Sunday morning feeling like I needed another hour of sleep... but to be honest, I always feel like I need another hour of sleep. If I ever lapse into one of those ten-year comas, someone please make sure I have the futuristic equivalent of a "just ten more minutes" snooze button available.

I want to strangle both the inventor or daylight savings time and the genius who decided to move this dates this year. Thanks to these jackasses, I get up in the dark now. And my favorite clock which autosets its time when the power goes out is now broken. I had to lie to it and change my timezone to get the time to display correctly. This is completely retarded. I didn't see a single correct clock in the way in to work today.

I live in Western Australia, and we're currently running a trial of Daylight savings. It's all well and good for those of us in the lower half of the state, where there is an appreciable difference in the sunset/sunrise times Summer vs Winter, but at the top of the state nearer the equator, it must be annoying at the very least.

(Not to mention it's hot enough that the airconditioning will be on wherever I am, daylight savings or no, so I doubt there's much of an energy saving there either)

Exactly. Congratulations on being (so far) the only reply that mentions distance from the equator.Your distance from the equator and the season are the two critical factors. If you live far from the equator and it is closer to the summer solstice than the winter solstice then you have 'daylight to spend'. Where should we spend it? In the evening, or in the morning? Most people don't have any interest in getting up earlier than 6:00 AM, so shifting those wasted hours of sunlight to the evening makes sense. I

The obvious answer is that congress needed an easy way to put something down on paper that they care about energy policy.Was there any in depth hearings on it, any experts called in to testify on the change, any representatives from industries affected by this change, actual debate on the subject? As far as i can remember, it was no on all accounts.Congress passes a law without knowing the full consequences, simply so they would have something to show in the 06 elections.

From TFA:But Ryan Kellogg and Hendrik Wolff, who are working on their doctorates in economics, say the reduced need for light in the evening will likely be negated by the increased need in the early morning.

That sounds logical, but it is not (IMHO). In the morning when I get up for work, I turn on maybe two lights (bedroom and bathroom). I am focused on getting ready for work, so there is not any entertainment (TV), stereo, really nothing except an electric razor. I brew my tea, and I am off to work (I don't think my headlights count as extra energy).

When I come home from work, well, all the lights in the kitchen, the halls, very soon the livingroom, the plasma TV, the surround sound, the computer. Lot's more things. Now, most of these don't change from summer to winter, except the lights. If it is light out, I do not turn them on (shocking). That is a savings of energy by not turning on the lights.

I really don't think this article took into account the different energy needs from the morning to night times. It is short sighted.

Spack

(ok, the gate is open for you to disagree, but really think about the way you do things different in the mornings and how most people do it different first)

You should have left out the mess about the tv, etc. It isn't affected and has nothing to do with this. Mentioning it only clouds the issue.The only difference is the livingroom, kitchen, and hall lights. So assuming you have 3 bulbs in the kitchen, 3 in the living room, and 1 in the hall, that's 7 bulbs that are on an extra hour a day.

It sounds like you're already at least a little energy-conscious, too, as most people will turn on a light if it's not quite bright enough in the room. You just leave the

Kellogg and Wolff came to their conclusion by studying Australia, where several states extended daylight-saving time (DST for short) by two months in 2000 to accommodate the Olympic Games in Sydney that year.[...]In fact, the two said, shifting Australians' clocks led to a tiny increase in power use.

So they're not exactly making it up and while you may think it's not logical, it does appear to be true. Whether the results apply to the US in the same way remains to be seen, of cours

Your TiVo Series 1 will work just fine as long as you're using the guide data to record everything. Sure, the time it displays will be wrong for three weeks, but it will record everything just like it did. All of the guide data is in GMT so your season passes don't need to be updated. Did you even RTFA?

When this bill was originally being talked about, various people said the study it was based on, done back in the 1970s was worthless. However they quickly got labeled as working for "big oil". Others mentioned that even using newer numbers the saving would not be great were also labeled as working for "big oil".
However all you "man is the prime source of global warming" can take heart, I have already seen a few articles where they are ignoring the claim that the change will save energy to focus on sayi

Here is what TiVo sent me. The Thursday (Mar 8) before DST. Thanks for the warning!

Dear TiVo Subscriber,

As Daylight Saving Time commences three weeks early this year, wethought we'd beat the clock to let you know how this unusual schedule mightaffect recordings on your TiVo(r) Series1 DVR. (Hint: Chances areslim.)

While the TiVo service will continue to automatically record yourSeason Pass(tm) programs and WishList(r) searches at the correct airtimeswithout incident, there are two things to note:

1) For the three weeks that follow the new Daylight Saving Time startdate (March 11), your Series1 TiVo(r) DVR may display the incorrecttime.

Again, to be clear, this is only a cosmetic issue and should not affectyour Season Pass(tm) and WishList(r) recordings.

2) If you have any MANUAL recordings scheduled between March 11 andApril 1, youwill need to adjust those recordings as appropriate. Here's how:

- From TiVo Central, select Pick Programs to Record, then To Do List.

- Locate your Manual Recording (by channel, date, time) and adjustaccordingly. For example, if you have a daily manual recording from 8:00 am

- 9:00 am, you will need to change it to 7:00 am - 8:00 am on March 11.(Quick Tip: If there are no recordings in this list preceded by theword "Manual", there's nothing further you need to do.)

- On April 1 be sure to change it back to its actual time, i.e., 8:00am - 9:00 am.

Obviously, the closer you are to the equator, the smaller the difference between daylight hours in summer and winter.

However, for those North/South of about 30 degrees, the difference is significant. Not to mention the (measured, reference unavailable) reduction in traffic accidents due to fewer people driving home from work in the dark.

Anyone who thinks the decision to keep the US on DST, or increase the time it is on DST, has anything at all to do with energy savings is woefully naive at best. The US increased DST because of commercial interests involved in outdoor entertainment and business. And those commercial interests bought congresscritters to do their bidding.

In a 24 hour society, daylight savings is an absolute farce outside of the May->August period when it's possible to have 16 hours of daylight. If there's, say, 14 hours of daylight, then you have 2 hours of darkness in most peoples' days wherever you shift the timezones, and that's only the optimum outcome because millions wake up before daylight and millions stay up after it.

If the government was really interested in "saving energy", it'd clamp down on emissions and fuel efficiency, and promote more effective techniques. Banning incandescent lighting and enforcing energy-saving bulb usage would strip several percent off of electricity demands year round and would cause a whole lot less annoyance than timezone changes. The EU and Australia have already figured this one out. [scotsman.com]

Ack! It's not worth it? All that extra time spent working to update our programs through the night and for no benefit?? And to make matters worse, those of us who spent time updating Java for DST might have been installing broken timezone data. See http://www.javasanity.org/article/7/thanks-for-the -time-sun [javasanity.org]

I can't remember specifically where I heard this (NPR?) but late last week a story came out detailing who would benefit and who wouldn't from the time change. One thing that came out was that by adjusting the time, there would be a longer period of sunlight for people to play golf in. Thus, more people = more greens fees = more profit!

Whether or not this is true I have no idea but here is a link [go.com] from ABC from back in 2005 which says the exact same thing.

Yup, I heard the story on NPR. It was an interview with Michael Downing, author of the book "Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Savings Time". He said there's not much energy savings, but more shopping because of DST.

It shouldn't be a law.. It should be up to the individual, weather or not, to follow DST.. like religious or political view. Also, It should be upto the individual, when to fall back or spring forward. [I would fall back while in bed and spring forward while at work, perhaps on a Monday morning, just like this.]

Psychologically, I feel a hell of a lot better when it's lighter out later. I know there are millions of people who have some sort of seasonal depression thing that are equally as delighted. I don't know if it saves any energy, but driving home from work when it's nice and bright out and being able to go for a nice walk or something in sunlight makes me happy.

If you live in the northern US and are doing the responsible thing and turning your central heating down overnight, then getting up an hour earlier means you're turning the heat back up earlier. Why is this wasteful? Because on sunny days in March there's significant solar gain once the sun's up. In my house that can be enough that the heat doesn't even need to be turned on in the morning - unless we get up too early.

In the evening, both the house and the outside environment lose their heat relatively slowly. The darkest hour isn't literally just before the dawn, but the coldest hour is. It's much better to spend the coldest hour under the covers - from an energy use point of view - than to get up during it or right on its tail and turn the furnace up to compensate.

Of course, if the government just looks at electrical use, this may not show in areas that don't primarily use electric heat. The increase in oil and natural gas use though, from this idiocy, will be real and significant.

A few years ago the Wall Street Journal estimated that every year we lose billions in productivity worldwide this week, due to simple grogginess. Hundreds of millions wake up an hour earlier than usual then spend a week trying to adjust. It sucks complete ass.

I have a toddler. Toddlers don't spring forward very well. Put them to bed an hour early and they'll spend two hours fighting it. Then get them up an hour early and see how happy they are to see you.

Please, please, either ditch it completely or use it all year long. I really like having an extra hour of daylight to spend outside with the boy, the dog, and the missus.

Is DST WORTH IT? Boy, Let me tell you a story about the place I come from.

I live in Indiana (a midwestern US state). Up until last year, we'd never done DST before at all (with a few exceptions in towns whose economies were linked to cities across the border in other, DST-observing states).

Before we had DST, it was HELL. All year, it got dark at like 2:00pm. There was no Little League Baseball, no football (american or otherwise) for the kids. Most of our youth joined gangs, who roamed the incessant darkness in large, heavily fortified bad-mpg SUVs, kicking puppies and beating up old ladies just for fun. There was no Christmas and no birthdays, and if we saw the Easter bunny we ATE HIM.

Though many people had the misconception that we were "America's Breadbasket", in fact the darkness prevented us from raising any sort of sustenance crops and most of us resorted to cannibalism to survive. Most Hoosiers (that's what we're called, it means "land of eternal darkness" in a Native American tongue) eventually starved to death, which was viewed as a welcome respite from the hellish, unstoppable night. Dogs and cats, living together, you get the picture.

Then, we elected a new Governor who brought us into the light (literally). With the introduction of DST, and the seemingly random (almost whimsical, really) distribution of our Counties between two time zones, our lives were changed forever. Now, it's light outside pretty much twenty-four-fucking-seven. Our kids are all on at least six sports teams and never shoot each other anymore. They call you "sir" or "ma'am" (these words were not used before, as it was difficult to discern gender in the darkness), shine your shoes for you, and present you with ice-cold lemonade from stands with amusingly misspelled signs. We discovered oil everywhere, we grow more crops than the world could ever possibly use (which has ended hunger globally) and we're all filthy, stinking RICH. All the women have big perky boobs, all the men are RIPPED, and everybody has an IQ of at least 160.

Yes Sir, I don't know what we'd do if it weren't for good ol' DST. I have to assume that with the new DST-extending rule from our good friends in the US Congress, we'll probably just evolve to a higher state of being and shed these silly, out-dated husks to become super-intelligent beings composed of pure energy.

Dude, I'm so glad you brought this story to light. I've been telling my friends this story for years, and they look at me like I'm crazy. Truth be told, they look at me like that no matter WHAT I'm talking about, but even more so when I get started on "The Indiana Thing." I drove, naively, into Indiana in 1983, searching for the woman in the L'eggs (panty hose) advertisement in my Mom's Redbook magazine. I was operating under the mistaken premise that Indiana was - rather than the breadbasket of America - the "Pantyhose and Nylons Capital of the World, due to an unfortunate misspelling of "hoosiers" in the budget encyclopedia set that my Mom purchased from someone at her office.
Driving around vainly searching for the L'eggs headquarters, the headlights in my '73 Chrysler Newport burned out halfway through my second day there, and I couldn't find my way back to the border. With a horde of cannibals closing in around my car (which only went about 10 miles between fillups - of gas, oil, or coolant) I thought the end was near. Quick thinking saved my life that day, and my penchant for popcorn. I ducked into the back seat and quickly fashioned a mask out of a box of Orville Redenbacher popcorn, and the cannibals began to bow and chant all around the Newport.
You didn't TELL your readers that Orville Redenbacher was a God to the denizens of once-dark Indiana, friend. Did you forget? Not likely. Were you, perhaps, brainwashed into secrecy? Possibly. Or, more sinister still, are you STILL a member of Redenbacher's scattered army of darkness? Just waiting for a new Governor to come in and repeal the DST proclamation?? State your motives, Sir!

I honestly do not get what the big stink is with the DST thing. This change was announced MORE THAN A FREAKIN' YEAR AGO! Any company that did not make preparations long ago DESERVES whatever problems they get. Really, this did not sneak up on us. My company prepared for it, made the appropriate changes to systems from DOS through XP. The DST change came and went. Guess what? No problems. Did it cost us any money? Um...no. When you give yourself plenty of time, you don't have to stop doing your exi

This change in DST was definitely worth it, if only for the benefit of forcing embedded systems designers to remember to not hard-code DST dates into their code. Historically, these dates have been changed about once per decade in the US alone. Assuming that they'll never change again is plain stupid. This shift will help train the current generation of developers to just not do that.

It shifts all the time. It's even slowly moved westward as cities on an eastern time zone border have pushed to get lumped into the next time zone. Why? Because the vast majority of businesses aren't flexible in their staffing hours and people can't choose to simply go in when they wake up.

My wife says that she wishes DST was all the time, as she has no problems waking up in the dark but tends to work long hours and we regularly stay up until 11 or 12.

And yeah, as a reminder to programmers it's great, but it's also great for all people to realize that time is abstract and can pretty much be whenever. I don't think I've ever heard an elderly person lament the time when we were all standard time.

As part of the learning process, when we experience unpleasant events, we gain the wisdom to avoid them in the future. The lesson here is: DST has changed many times in the past, and it will certainly change again in the future. Failure to anticipate this causes a lot of extra work for people. Training always has a cost, and we have just seen the cost of this lesson.

"This change in DST was definitely worth it, if only for the benefit of forcing embedded systems designers to remember to not hard-code DST dates into their code."I'd buy into that if there was any evidence that programmers ever learned from their mistakes. But in my experience, the opposite is true: We keep making the same damn mistakes, over and over.

Hell, look at buffer overflows. Still the #1 cause of security bugs. It's not like bounds checking is a radically new idea.

That's because every time you get an experienced batch of 45 year old programmers, they replace them with another batch of inexperienced 22 year old college kids.The last project delivered by IBM (three "teams" of basically college kids under three seasoned vets) had some extremely boneheaded obvious mistakes. The basic design was pretty good (effect of the vets probably) We spent over 4 years fixing what we could but without a clear ROI some things will never be fixed.

Time zone specific calculations are on the client end, as all NTP sources give time in UST. So even if your embedded device is time syncing, if the software says "DST starts in april in timezone X" it is going to be wrong (even if it is very close to being wrong by an hour). The GP ignores the fact that no amount of "flexibility" in the DST implementation is going to make it economically feasible to support a $50 device for longer than production run. The thing to fix is setting up a public system that stores time offsets for all localities and make it a standard part of all OSes, like NTP.

Now if only they used it. I've got an analog radio clock that doesn't even display the date, but for some reason they decided to read the date bits and do some calendar calculations (or hard code the next X years of DST dates) to calculate DST rather than reading the flag.

I don't understand why you wouldn't use the flag -- it seems easier to just read the flag than to calculate the start/stop dates. There's even a countdown so you can miss several days of syncing before the switch and still know when it should happen. Apparently not all clock designers share my hatred for calendar calculations.

FYI: Common radio clocks use the 60kHz WWVB signal not the 2.5-20 MHz WWV signals. They both contain the digital timecode information, but WWV and WWVH also include frequency information (440 Hz, 500 Hz, 600 Hz, 1000 Hz and 1500 Hz beeps) and vocal timestamps, and reports about the weather, GPS health, and solar/radio conditions. In general WWV/WWVH are intended for manual use (all the time information is available in a format useful to human ears) and use outside the WWVB range, but WWVB is more accurate where available (better straight-line propagation) and less complicated to decode electronically due to the extremely low bit rate (a standard serial port can decode directly from an AM amp).

Or at the very least, the acronym DST should change. Since the so-called "standard" time lasts from the first Sunday of November to the second Sunday of March which is 19 weeks, and the "daylight saving time" lasts the remaining 34 weeks, the one which lasts longer (summer time) should be called "standard time", while the winter time, opposite of DST, should really be called "daylight wasting time".

Really, if we're so save daylight, why not save it all year long? Otherwise, we're just wasting it.

To me all that daylight at 4am (ok, a bit of an exageration) in the summertime is wasted. But light at 9pm? Not wasted . . . that means outdoor activity like bike rides after work, especially earlier in the spring when it would be getting dark at 6:30 instead of 7:30. I think that it is this sense that keeps it alive, rather than the Big Brother type of control you imply.

In the US, it was changed federally in 1918, 1920, 1942, 1945, 1966, 1974, 1975, 1985, 1986 and 2007. That averages out to about once per decade. Up until 1966, many individual states also fiddled with the times. Even today, states are allowed to opt in and out of DST altogether, and Indiana just recently changed its rules.